SPREAD | ArtCulture

By Kiša Lala

There is a buzz of activity around Mika Rottenberg’s new art project in Harlem —a giant wooden box constructed like a Rubik’s cube with sliding rooms. I visited her while a crew of carpenters, engineers, and assistants finished up before filming began the following week. I asked if she ever worried about the rough neighborhood and the curious strangers walking in from the street. She laughed, “A guy got shot a couple weeks ago but other than that, no!”

Playing with the processes of manufacturing, and examining the value of labour—along with its material and energetic aspects—have been the focus of Mika’s recent work. Her last major installation, Cheese, showed at the Whitney Biennial in 2008. In 2006 she received attention in the art world with her video installation, Dough, in which a mass of dough was stretched and purged through a mechanical and organic system, connected by physical and emotional constructs that resulted in a packaged product of abstract and indeterminate value.

The current project is architecturally far more complex than Dough, and involves a bigger budget and grander plans. Her new work will debut at SFMoMA this summer, followed by dual shows in the fall at Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery and Mary Boone Gallery.

It incorporates video footage shot in India at a rubber plantation, and also at an iceberg lettuce-picking farm in California. There were plans also of filming rabbits that grew angora and received haircuts, which had to be postponed. The layering of processes, she admits, can become endless if not for the constraints of practicality.

Like her other works, it promises to be a set that will feature colorful characters with extreme body types and unusual abilities. She describes the project, pointing and gesticulating: “The people get a massage…the reality and the fiction come together. You are going to see her digging a hole in the ground and then putting their hand in the hole, and they come out of here…and they get serviced, they get massaged, so things appear physically connected.”

Mika’s descriptions are typically abstruse but somehow they make sense when visually realized; when one sees the trapped energy being palpably articulated through a system of mechanical levers, human desires, tears, and sweat.

In this particular case, the manufacturing process is a blend of fact and fiction through which things get crushed together to produce blush . The last step, she says is a “fictional” one: “When the walls of the cube get squeezed the person inside gets really red, and when released, they package their blush.”

She holds up a small panel of crushed material. It has bits of green lettuce, latex, blush—it is the final product of the manufacturing process, the result of her labours, and an object of art. She says, “This cube of stuff will be on view at Mary Boone, there will be a photo of her holding it, and this is going to be for sale at the gallery. It plays with the idea of what makes value and what makes something valuable.”

I ask, “Once it’s finished, will it be recycled?”  “Cheese was sort of recycled, put into three pieces and sold. Dough was a really small set so I kept some of the wood and threw a lot of it out…[this piece is in question] we may save and store it for now…they all want to sell it, but that is really not the piece and I don’t want it to become too circus-y or too monumental.”

Despite the hubbub of people and production work surrounding her art, Mika prefers isolation and likes to keep things private and the exposure to a minimum. Otherwise, she says, it messes with your head, and she has to ask herself: “Why are you doing it then? How do you tap back into that space, which is your personal interest? You just have to keep on doing it no matter what.”